Working with JSON in Powershell - Collection of hashtables

Some time you interact with a rest API, which returns a block of json containing a collection of items that you want to enumerate over. If the collection of items is not in an array, but looks like the following, it is challenging to iterate over the collection.

{
    "firstItem" : [
        "one",
        "two"
    ],
    "next" : [
        "yes",
        "no",
        "maybe"
    ],
    "6739" : [
        "red",
        "blue",
        "green"
    ]
}

Of course we could say that the author of the rest api should change the returned result to make it easier to interact with, but that is not always within our control.

In PowerShell we can make this collection enumerable with a few extra lines of code. 

If you are working with a newer version of PowerShell (version 6 or newer) you can use the -AsHashtable parameter to ConvertFrom-JSON. 

If that is not the case, you can still make the json response enumerable as shown below. 

$json = ... response from the api
$data = $json | ConvertFrom-Json

$enumerableData = $data.psobject.properties | Select-Object Name, Value
foreach ($element in $enumerableData)
{
    Write-host "$($element.Name)"
    foreach ($element in $element.Value)
    {
	Write-Host "`t$element"
    }
}

The output from that is:

firstItem
        one
        two
next
        yes
        no
        maybe
6739
        red
        blue
        green

It is a nice little snippet that gets the job done.